People Over 65 More Likely to Share Fake News On Social Media: New Research

Facebook users over 65 are far more likely to share fake news on social media. This is according to a recent study conducted.

Researchers at both Princeton and New York University came to an interesting conclusion. They found that the practice of spreading so-called fake news was rare overall. A person’s likelihood of sharing it correlated more strongly with age than it did with education, sex, or political views.

‘No other demographic characteristic seems to have a consistent effect on sharing fake news, making our age finding that much more notable,’ wrote the authors of the study.

Researchers commissioned an online sample of 3,500 people with the goal of seeing characteristics that promote disinformation. Not all of them were Facebook users. The time span taken into scope was around the November 2016 US elections.

The researchers defined fake news as ‘knowingly false or misleading content created largely for the purpose of generating ad revenue.’

While that aligns with the original meaning of the phrase that sprang up ahead of the 2016 election, US President Donald Trump has more often used it to refer to reputable news organisations he doesn’t like.

Of those who said they used Facebook, only 49 percent agreed to share any profile data. Of those users, people older than 65 captured the researchers’ attention.

Eleven percent of users older than 65 shared an article consistent with the study’s definition of fake news. Just three percent of users aged 18 to 29 did the same.

The study drew its list of ‘fake news domains’ from a list assembled by Craig Silverman of BuzzFeed News.

Andrew Guess told The Verge that the findings were not as obvious as some people think. Andrew Guess is the coauthor of the study and a political scientist at Princeton University.

‘For me, what is pretty striking is that the relationship holds even when you control for party affiliation or ideology,’ he said.

‘The fact that it’s independent of these other traits is pretty surprising to me. It’s not just being driven by older people being more conservative.’

The study did also find that, of those participating in the study, Republicans shared more links to sites peddling disinformation than Democrats, but ‘self-described independents’ shared roughly the same number of those sites as Republicans.

The study’s conclusion, that people 65 years and older share most of the intentionally false or misleading news we see on social media, could be helpful for social networks in deciphering how to tackle the spread of disinformation.

The study’s authors also said more context was needed, since the oldest generation may not have a ‘level of digital media literacy necessary to reliably determine the trustworthiness of news encountered online.’